For thousands of years, humans have sought to improve their success at fishing, both as a means for providing nourishment and as an entertaining activity. In recent years, the sport of competitive fishing has grown in popularity, and the art and science of catching fish has developed correspondingly, as professional sport fishermen seek a competitive advantage.
One of the age-old methods of fishing exploits the fact that many sport fish are predatory on smaller fish, and so a smaller, live bait fish is placed on a hook and cast into the water. A target fish is prospectively attracted to the bait fish, whether by sight (of motion of the bait fish) or smell, particularly of blood or of stress-induced hormones. When the target fish eats the bait fish, the target fish is hooked and, if everything goes as is intended, landed.
There are a number of variations on this arrangement well known to those skilled in the art of sport fishing. Heretofore, however, these variations have not made use of the full range of predatory behavior of sport fish.
As a survival instinct, a predator fish ideally consumes as little energy as possible in hunting for food. When confronted with a school of prey fish, the predator fish will often seek out the member of the school that is the most likely to be caught easily. That fish will be the one that is the most highly distressed, whether by an injury or some other factor known only to the fish itself. When the prey fish is under stress, it secretes pheromones or hormones that are intended to help the prey fish compensate for the stress. The predator fish, having a highly developed sensory perception of these chemicals, can identify the distressed fish and strike at it more easily than at a healthy fish not under stress.
What is needed, then, is a fishing lure apparatus, suitable for use with live bait, that works to induce the secretion of stress-induced chemicals.